Chapter 21: The Signing
The solicitor arrived within the hour, a stooped man with ink-stained cuffs and the aggrieved expression of a craftsman summoned from his supper. He bowed to the monarchs, bowed to Blair, and spread a fresh casing of vellum across the long table beneath the mirrors.
"The Lady Blair wishes a clause of her own," Vespera said. "Of Lineage and Liberty. I have written it here." She passed the slip of her own hand across the table. "You will incorporate it after the final clause. Word for word. Nothing amended."
The solicitor read the slip twice. His eyebrows climbed, and then climbed further, and Blair watched him arrive at the meaning of it the way she had watched the wax seal break, slowly and all at once.
"Of royal blood," he said. "Made of the throne. And named Ravenwood."
"You see the difficulty," Lucien said, settling into a chair at the table's head. "You will be the first solicitor in court history to draft such a thing. Try not to weep on the vellum. It stains."
The man did not weep. He sharpened a pen with small vicious strokes and began.
Blair stood and watched him work, and Vespera stood beside her, and the scratch of the pen filled the chamber like rain. He wrote the first clause of station, and the second of maintenance, and the third of protection, and each time his hand came to the words Lady Blair Veil he pressed the letters a little deeper, as if he understood that her name was going to be argued over in drawing rooms for a hundred years.
The fourth clause of her person came next, and here he paused.
"Shall I retain the language of refusal?" he asked, glancing up. "Some of the old houses will call it, forgive me, indulgent."
"Retain it," Vespera said, in a voice that closed the subject like a drawer.
He retained it. The fifth clause with Marta Sawyer's name in it. The sixth with the forbidden shelves. The clauses of fees, of dowry, of functions, of Dove Estara-Major welcomed at any hour. Blair read each one as it dried, leaning over the solicitor's shoulder, and her lips moved without sound, and Vespera's cool fingers came to rest at the back of her neck and stayed there, a small weight, an anchor.
Then the final clause. Of making. The solicitor wrote the words princess of the house, equal of the King, equal of the Queen, and his pen hesitated over equal for only a moment before it committed.
And after the final, in the space Vespera had marked, the new clause, the Queen's own hand transcribed into the body of the writ.
Of Lineage and Liberty. Let it be recorded that Blair Veil reads this writ entire, twice, with understanding. Let it be recorded that she consents freely, under no compulsion, and that she takes the name Ravenwood of her own choosing, and that she was Made in the sight of witnesses with her eyes open. She was not made into anything. She walked in.
Blair read that clause four times. The rule had been twice, but she had negotiated the rule and thought she could stretch it too.
"That's it," she said. "That's the whole of it."
"It is the whole of it," the solicitor said. He blotted the last line and sat back, and for the first time he looked at her without the aggrieved expression, and there was something else in his face, something like an old man looking at weather he had never seen before. "Madam, I have drafted contracts for this house for a hundred and twenty years. Kings and duchesses and blood prices and border treaties. I have never written anything like this."
"Good," Blair said. "I'd hate to be ordinary."
Lucien laughed from his chair, low and delighted. "There is no saving us. She's been ours for two months and she already talks like the throne."
The solicitor rose, bowed, and left the re-copied writ on the table, and the doors had barely shut behind him before Blair was at it again, unrolling the scroll along the black and white tiles of the table's length, reading the final clauses twice more as the candles guttered.
Three lines waited at the bottom. The King's. The Queen's. Hers.
Vespera sent a footman for the needle, and while they waited Blair stood at the window with her hand pressed to the cold glass. Below, the gardens were silver and still. Somewhere in the dark of the palace a bell rang twice, faintly, the hour of the half. Her heart was doing its small quick human thing and she let it. In three days, she thought, it would slow. In three days it would never stop, but it would change. Dove had told her that too. The heart of the Made keeps time with forever.
"You are not required to say anything," Vespera said, coming to stand at her shoulder. "When the needle comes. There is no speech in the old rites. Only the blood and the names."
"I know. I've read the books. The forbidden shelves, remember."
"You have read the books," Vespera said. "It is not the same as the needle. Nothing in any book is the same as the needle." Her burgundy eyes moved over Blair's face, cataloguing her, the way she had once catalogued Blair across a library, and her voice dropped to something that was not the Queen at all. "Last chance, little rose. I mean it. The writ stands with or without the making. You are loved either way. I did not think I would say that word tonight, and here it is. Loved."
Blair turned from the window. "Say it again."
"Loved."
"Then that's my speech," Blair said, and her voice cracked in the middle of it and she let it crack. "Freely given. Eyes open. I walked in."
The needle came in a case of black lacquer, fine as a rose's thorn, with a shallow silver dish beside it for the blood. Lucien took it from the servant's tray himself and dismissed the man with a flick of two fingers, and then it was only the three of them in the cavernous chamber, the crimson velvet and the mirrors and the scroll laid open like a road.
"Lady Blair Veil," Lucien said, and his voice had changed, gone formal and old, the voice of a man reciting something learned four centuries before. "The house of the Moonlit Throne offers you its blood and its name. You will open your own hand. No other hand may do it, in the old rites. The blood must be yours, freely given."
He held out the needle across his open palm.
Blair took it. It was lighter than it looked, warmer than the air of the room, as if it had been kept near a body. She looked at the three mirrors along the far wall and found herself there, three of her, a small woman in ivory silk holding a needle, and this time she did not look away, and none of her looked away.
"Read the final clauses once more, aloud," Vespera said. "It is custom. The record should hear your voice."
Blair drew a breath and read. "Of making. Let it be known that the house of the Moonlit Throne intends to Make the Lady Blair Veil of royal blood, by the old rites, with the witness of the Arch-Duke Dante Estara and the Lady Dove Estara-Major, and that upon the making she shall cease to be concubine, or beloved, or ward, and shall stand as princess of the house, equal of the King, equal of the Queen, kin of their blood, forever." She turned the scroll a little. "Of Lineage and Liberty. I read this writ entire, twice, with understanding. I consent freely, under no compulsion. I take the name Ravenwood of my own choosing. I was not made into anything." Her voice caught and steadied. "I walked in."
"Then walk," Lucien said softly.
She set the point of the needle against the pad of her thumb. Her hand shook, and she let it, because it was honest. She pressed.
The pain was small and bright, a white spark in the pad of her thumb, and the blood came up dark and quick, welling against the candlelight. She held her hand over the silver dish and watched three drops fall, each one a small dark bell of sound against the metal.
Vespera's breath left her in a long slow stream she did not need and could not help.
Blair pressed her thumb to the third line, the one drawn in red ink, the one waiting. The blood took to the vellum at once, drinking in, and she wrote her name in her own careful scullery hand, learned over bowls of grey suds and a hundred cold sinks, and the letters were not beautiful and they were sure.
Blair Veil, the blood said. And beside it, in the space the new clause required, she added the name she had chosen, the name she would carry into forever, and the two names sat together on the line like a door and its open frame.
Blair Veil Ravenwood.
"There," she said, and her voice was steady now, all the way through. "It's done. I'm nobody's project. I'm your daughter of the blood, and I signed myself in."
Lucien came to the table. He did not hesitate. He took the needle, opened his own thumb with the ease of a man performing a gesture worn smooth by centuries, and pressed his signature below hers in blood that came black in the candlelight, Lucien Ravenwood, the letters sharp and certain as blade work. Vespera followed, her hand immaculate even in blood, Vespera Ravenwood in a script like frost on glass, and when all three names had dried the solicitor's seal went down over them, black wax and the smear of the house, and the Blood-writ was no longer an offer. It was a fact.
Blair looked at the three signatures and felt the room tilt gently, the way a ship tilts, the way the world had tilted the night a queen had looked up from a library chair and seen a maid reading.
"Well," she said. "The old houses are going to be insufferable."
"The old houses are going to be apoplectic," Lucien said, "and I am going to enjoy every decade of it." He drew a folded card from his breast, already written, already sealed, and she realized he had prepared it before tonight, before her consent, prepared it and carried it and almost certainly prayed over it, and her chest did something complicated and warm. He pressed it into a footman's hand at the door. "To the Arch-Duke Dante Estara. Wake him. Wake the Lady Dove with him. The rites begin within the hour, and the witnesses must stand for all of it."
"The hour, sire? The Arch-Duke will want to know the reason for the waking."
Lucien smiled, and it was not the smile for the ballroom, it was the real one, sharp and glad. "Tell him the Moonlit Throne is Making a princess of royal blood tonight. Tell him she was a scullery maid. Tell him she negotiated the writ herself, and that the Queen wrote her clause in her own hand, and that she signed without being asked twice." He glanced at Blair, and his voice dropped, intimate, meant only for the footman's trained ears and her own. "Tell him to hurry. I have waited four hundred and fifty years to witness something, and I find I am impatient."
The footman went at a dead run. Blair heard his boots fade down the corridor and out into the dark of the palace, toward the distant towers where the old houses slept through the day hours like carrion birds, and she thought of Dante waking, and of Dove, and she smiled at the thought of Dove's face when the news arrived.
Within the hour. Her whole body understood it before her mind did, a low hum starting in her blood, in the pad of her opened thumb, in the pulse at her throat that a candle of making was going to put out and keep forever.
Vespera took her hand. Turned it over. Examined the small cut with the tenderness of a woman touching something she had made.
"It will not scar," the Queen said. "Human cuts close, and the Made do not scar at all. But I will remember where it was. I remember everything about tonight."
"You're shaking," Blair said.
"I am not."
"You are. Your hand. Look at it." Blair held the Queen's fingers up between them, and it was true, a fine tremor ran through the porcelain skin, and Vespera looked at their joined hands as though they belonged to someone else.
"Four hundred years," the Queen said at last. "I have signed treaties that moved borders. I have watched the court try to poison my husband twice and my own wine once. I have not shaken." Her thumb moved over Blair's knuckles, once, slowly. "You did this in one reading. I rehearsed offering you the writ in the solar for two hours. I had a speech prepared for your refusal. It was a good speech. I am very glad it was wasted."
"Tell me the speech someday."
"If you are good. If you are very good, and for several centuries."
Boots in the corridor again, returning, two sets this time, and a voice outside the doors, low and sleep-rough and amused. The doors opened, and the Arch-Duke Dante Estara filled the frame, silver hair loose to his waist, dressed in a dressing gown of dark green that made his forest eyes burn like lamps. Behind him came Dove, wide awake and radiant, emerald silk thrown over her shoulders and her lavender eyes already fixed on Blair with an expression that said everything her mouth did not need to.
"Oh, you magnificent little creature," Dove said, and crossed the room, and took Blair's face in both hands. "You read it twice. You added a clause. You made the Queen write in her own hand. I heard it from the footman on the stairs and I made him repeat every word twice."
"You're supposed to witness formally," Dante said dryly, shrugging off his gown to reveal court dress beneath, as though he had dressed for this before waking. "There are forms. There is a candle."
"There is a princess," Dove said, not releasing Blair's face. "Forms can wait their turn."
Blair laughed, and the sound came out wet and bright, and in the three mirrors along the wall she saw all of herself, a small woman in ivory silk surrounded by monsters who loved her, and the needle's cut throbbed gently in her thumb like a second heartbeat learning its new time.
Lucien lifted a long white candle from the case the footman had brought, older than any of the furniture, its wax the color of bone.
"Then let the forms begin," he said, "and let the court choke on them."
The candle's wick took the flame, and the flame stood straight, and did not flicker, and the rites began.